


Marked by Lightning

by RenGoneMad



Category: Naruto
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Discord: Umino Hours, I'm making that a tag, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, M/M, Mild Horror, Mostly Canon Compliant?, POV Umino Iruka, Raiju!Kakashi - Freeform, Umino Hours Discord Server 90 Minutes To Gift Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:40:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27621500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RenGoneMad/pseuds/RenGoneMad
Summary: It was Anko who first described it to Iruka: a huge wolf, with silver fur that gleamed blue with the shroud of living lightning that surrounded it. She said she heard it howl the night before the Kyuubi attack.Her father had called it the Raijū, told her to never go outside during a thunderstorm and to always sleep on her belly on dark nights.She said that the trees weren’t struck by lightning, but scratched by the Raijū’s claws.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Umino Iruka
Comments: 16
Kudos: 118
Collections: 90 Mins To Gift - Halloween Edition





	Marked by Lightning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LazarusII](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LazarusII/gifts).



> So, I actually wrote this on Halloween, but got distracted and only posted it to tumblr. ^_^" Sorry about that.
> 
> This is for LazarusII, who I once again had the excellent luck to get for an exchange. (This time in Umino Hours, where the wonderful mods who hosted this event live!) I'm glad you liked it, and it was a pleasure to write for you, Laz. <3
> 
> (This was written in 90-minutes total with very minimal editing and no beta, so. >.< My apologies for any typos or other errors that might have occurred.)

At the age of ten, Iruka had spent nearly as much time in the forests of Konoha as he had his own home. He hated sitting still, being confined. He spent hours stripping back and peeling tinder, then more hours attempting to light it with the only fire seal he knew. He practiced with his mother’s shuriken on the trees behind their house and climbed barefoot to retrieve them, rough bark scraping against the soles of his feet, forming calluses and scrapes that his father would pour medicinal cleanser over, stinging far worse than the wound itself. 

It never stopped Iruka from going out again. 

Sometimes, he went further than he should have.

At a certain point, the woods north-east of Konoha’s walls shifted, from soft conifers into looming evergreens and beeches that had never been cleared by man’s hand. They grew so thick around that Iruka didn’t think five of him would be able to quite reach around the bases. On one fallen trunk, he counted over a hundred rings before losing his place. 

There was another difference in the trees outside of Konoha: 

Some of them were scarred. 

Iruka had seen pine trees damaged by hurricanes before. He had seen branches stripped thin of leaves and twigs, broken limbs dangling for a few days before crashing down to the earth.

These scars were different. 

They ran lengthwise down the tree’s trunks, splitting through the bark and inches into the wood. Some of the scars were blackened—Iruka imagined they were darkened by the sun in the same way that his own scar had been—but others were a dull crimson, a shade like blood or lava peering through a crevasse. When he was ten, Iruka snuck his fingers inside one, wiggling until he could reach the innards. 

They burned. 

Iruka hissed and jerked back, scraping his knuckles raw against the bark. It was barely a sting in comparison to the blisters morphing his fingerprints. They throbbed in time with his heartbeat.

He crouched to the ground, ripping up a piece of moss and pressing it to the overheated skin. It did little to soothe the ache, but he clutched it tight his entire walk home. He didn’t stop walking, even as the sun set and he could barely see anything but his own feet and the occasional, glowing embers within massive oaks. 

There were trees marked in different ways, too—ones whose limbs had exploded, bark splaying like water frozen from a hose. A few, a very few, were cleaved in half. Each side dipped, bowing towards the ground, until their stumps rotted and gravity dragged them down at last. 

Those trees never survived.

Iruka’s father said that the others, the red ones, had been struck by lightning. He told Iruka that eventually the embers would cool into ash and the trees would grow around the wound, sealing their dead cells into themselves to use as nourishment for what still lived.

That, or they rotted into mulch. 

“How long do they stay hot after a storm?” 

His father hesitated. He paused in sharpening his kunai, looking out the window unseeingly, a deep furrow between his brows. “I’m not sure. A day, perhaps.” 

Iruka bit his lip rather than argue, but he knew that wasn’t true; no storm clouds had darkened Konoha’s skies for the last two weeks.

* * *

Four days later, something scorched the trees again. Iruka didn’t touch them that time, but he flexed his healing hand, felt the taut pull of new skin, and wondered. 

* * *

By the time Iruka heard about the Raijū, his parents were no longer alive for him to ask. 

It was Anko who first described it to him: a huge wolf, with silver fur that gleamed blue with the shroud of living lightning that surrounded it. She said she heard it howl the night before the Kyuubi attack. Her father had called it the Raijū, told her to never go outside during a thunderstorm and to always sleep on her belly on dark nights. 

She said that the trees weren’t struck by lightning, but scratched by the Raijū’s claws.

Iruka didn’t know about any of that—but he sat outside during the next storm, all the same, curling up under the branches of an evergreen. A rivulet of rain water trickled down from the matte leaves, onto the crown of Iruka’s head. He shivered from his scalp to his toes, drawing his legs in tight as mud began to soak into his pants. 

Eventually, he must have fallen asleep. 

When he awoke, dawn was approaching, and electric static lingered in the air. 

He had dreamt of a thousand chirping birds, and an eye as dark as the midnight sky. 

* * *

He didn’t try to meet the Raijū again.

* * *

It had been over a decade since Iruka had last been caught out in a thunderstorm. It wasn’t a nostalgic experience. Instead of huddling into a ball and waiting for lightning to strike, he was running for home. Rain beat the ground around him, but his heartbeat drowned out the sound. His sandals skidded on the slick moss that coated the trees. The chakra he channeled to the souls of his feet kept him from sliding him off, giving him the traction necessary to propel himself forward again. 

The storm must have been travelling from Konoha: Iruka hadn’t seen a single cloud when he set back towards home. He would have stayed in town if he had, maybe gotten a cheap room at the local hot spring. As much as Iruka hated to admit it, Naruto leaving to train with Jiraiya had it’s good points—namely, that Iruka was no longer spending a fifth of his paychecks on ramen each week.

Now, it was too late to go back. He couldn’t outrun the storm, and he was just barely closer to Konoha than his origin. His best bet was to power through it, coming out on the other side soaked, but with less time in the forest and storm than if he tried to find shelter and failed.

He had never been scared of lightning.

It was a fine plan—until he felt at least a dozen chakra signatures pop to life in the east. 

They were all grouped together, like a conglomerate of shinobi had been scooped up and teleported to the soggiest corner of the Land of Fire. Or, like a bunch of shinobi had been concealing their presences and then swooped in for an ambush. 

That one was slightly more likely. 

Iruka slowed to a halt, closing his eyes and focusing on the distance between them. He had a decent chance of getting away unnoticed if he curved directly west. It was the logical choice: his likelihood of taking on a dozen enemies and surviving was too close to nil for comfort, and he couldn’t bet on the majority of them being Konoha shinobi. 

However… given the territory, their proximity to home—there almost certainly _were_ a few comrades among them. If they were running the ambush then Iruka could make things far worse by attempting to interfere in a battle strategy of which he had no part. 

But if they were overpowered—or if they were the targets—

There was really no choice at all.

Cloaking his chakra as best he could, Iruka dropped to lower branches and finally to the forest floor. A giant clap of thunder sounded and a stunning white bolt lit up the sky, casting the canopy in sharp relief. The trunks and leaves this low down hid Iruka in enough shadow that it was his best bet for making it to the scuffle unannounced.

He was only a few hundred yards away, throat tight and muscle tensed, when he felt the pinpoints of chakra begin to flicker.

One by one, they were snuffed out.

Within thirty seconds, only one remained.

Iruka had already unlatched his kunai’s holster. His right hand hovered by it. A cold chill ran from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. 

This time, it wasn’t due to the rain.

The air felt charged, the atmosphere crackling around him and bursting in his eardrums like static. It was so loud, so unnerving, so intense—that he hardly noticed the chakra signature move towards him.

Then, he noticed. 

He noticed, because just through the copse of trees, in a small clearing, moonlight filtered through the trees and cast its light on silver fur and blue lightning. 

For a moment, Iruka couldn’t breathe. His fingers convulsed around the hilt of his kunai, gripping it tightly enough that his knuckles cracked, but he could move nothing else. The giant wolf stared back at him, one eye of crimson and another darker than midnight. 

Iruka blinked, and the wolf was gone.

The silver and crimson and darkness all remained. 

Kakashi’s hair was drenched by the rain, plastered to his face and neck, but Iruka thought he could see bright red washing away with the water. It soaked into his flak vest, turning the olive green to rust. His normal gloves were reduced to tattered strips of cloth dripping from his wrists, metal guards gone. Long, thick fingernails drew from the nail beds like claws.

Iruka nearly laughed hysterically as he thought, _“maybe that’s why he only wears fingerless.”_

Fortunately, the last difference from the Kakashi that Iruka liked to think he knew… it was enough to cut off any potential humor at the jugular.

The mask was gone. 

The light stubble over his chin would have been invisible if not for the streak of blood that oozed from a slit across one high cheekbone, painting the follicles crimson. Torn fabric bunched underneath Kakashi’s angular jaw, and a small blemish marked just below the corner of thin lips.

Behind the lips, which were slightly parted—perhaps saying something that couldn’t force its way into Iruka’s fogged mind—were sharp, prominent canines, hand-crafted as if by a master, borne to rend flesh and breach vulnerable arteries. 

Blood stained each fang. 

The storm raged on. Water clumped Iruka’s eyelashes and trickled into his eyes. He blinked it away, but the scene before him didn’t change.

Now, he knew that the scents of salt and ozone, the charge that set even damp hairs on end and broke out gooseflesh along Iruka’s arms—they weren’t the storm. 

The Raijū was real. 

Kakashi took a step forward. 

Iruka couldn’t move. His body was frozen, muscles locked as if in rigor mortis. He would have thought it was the power of the Sharingan if not for the fact that it was closed. The eyelid over it was split down the center, large gash extending from his brow to his cheek. It still glowed an angry shade, even after how many years it had been rumored to exist. 

Iruka imagined it as a strike of lightning—burning embers in a dying tree.

Kakashi’s expression was no more readable without the mask, or perhaps the differences merely distracted from any emotion that might have been displayed. Iruka could tell there was something, burning within his core, swirling in a dark iris, but he couldn’t name it. It was a taste, on the tip of his tongue and sliding down his throat to settle in his stomach. 

Iruka swallowed it all, drinking in every inch of Kakashi’s features even as the man—wolf—demon—approached. Carefully, steadily. 

Kakashi reached him. He raised a hand. It hovered over Iruka’s collarbone, curved talons inches from his throat and the pulse that pounded in it. 

Iruka remembered those hands. 

He remembered that hand brushing his at the mission desk, remembered the bit of static that always seemed to jump between them. He remembered watching those fingers as they grasped a lurid orange cover. He remembered watching them curl around a glass, condensation dripping down them, and remembered wishing it was Iruka who felt their touch instead.

Now, if Kakashi touched him—he felt as though he would be seared to the bone, with a long red scar that would spell his death or his future. Either way, Kakashi could carve through Iruka and hollow his insides, replacing them with molten heat that would soon burn to ash. 

"I didn't take you for the type to freeze in fear, Iruka-sensei,” Kakashi murmured. 

Slowly, Iruka dragged his gaze from the lethal claw, from ivory canines. He met Kakashi’s stare. He had to swallow several times before he could find his voice, rough as though he’d been inhaling smoke. "I'm not."

Kakashi’s features barely shifted. There was no difference that Iruka could discern; perhaps it was only the flash of lightning illuminating Kakashi in stark white which made the ghostly apparition of the wolf flicker in Iruka’s vision once more. Perhaps it was Iruka’s own reflection which made Kakashi’s eye seem guarded—as if _Iruka_ were the one readying to spring an attack.

As if Iruka had the power to do damage if he did. 

"Then why are you still here?"

Over Kakashi’s shoulder, Iruka could see an ancient oak, nearly split in two. Its bark peeled from the superheated spot as if it could retract from the claw which had seared it. 

Iruka remembered years of subtle touches to skin and cloth, moments that Iruka would have never known existed if they hadn’t made his blood sing and his mind fill with static. Electricity. Lightning.

Iruka remembered a thousand birds and a dark eye—a dream that had always been real. 

“I’m about to find out.”

Iruka leaned forward. Their lips met at the same moment that Kakashi’s palm—claws and all—met Iruka’s throat.


End file.
